Various types of surface-mounted electronic components are heretofore known, but when an electronic component is directly bonded onto the mounting side of a circuit board using paste-like bonding material (such as solder or brazing material), the high-temperature treatment involved may cause thermal expansion or thermal absorption on the mounting side of the circuit board and the resulting stress may damage the electronic component. When this happens, oftentimes the characteristics of the electronic component will drop.
Accordingly, a method has been used whereby multiple electronic components are layered to mitigate the stress generated by the circuit board as a result of thermal expansion or thermal contraction. In addition, use of a multi-layer ceramic capacitor, multi-layer ceramic varistor and other surface-mounted electronic components has become the mainstream approach today as an alternative to the aforementioned method. Examples of multi-layer ceramic capacitors can be found in Patent Literature 1 or the like.
The multi-layer ceramic capacitor described in Patent Literature 1 is structured in such a way that many internal electrodes are layered and placed in a ceramic dielectric element and then external electrodes connected to the internal electrodes are integrally provided on both ends of the element. According to this structure, directly bonding the external electrodes of the multi-layer ceramic capacitor onto the mounting side of the circuit board may cause the multi-layer ceramic capacitor element to crack when it receives stress from the circuit board. In light of the above, metal terminals are soldered onto the external electrodes and these metal terminals are used to absorb stress from the circuit board.